Damning a Whole Generation to Make a Policy Point

By Todd Gitlin

This post is part of our forum on Michael Kinsley's October cover story exploring
the legacy of the Baby Boomers and what they owe the country. Follow
the debate here.

Generational hypergeneralization is the last refuge of the
pundit. I get the feeling that even the playful Michael Kinsley
half-knows that he's been snookered into pitching his political-economic
views as a generational manifesto. This is what comes of standing pat
conceptually as we move into the sixth decade of Baby Boom blather.
Generation talk gussies up a position that, in my view, is part
righteousness (restoring the estate tax) and part fetish (deficit
hawkery).

"The indictment against the Baby Boom generation is
familiar, way oversimplified, and only partly fair," Kinsley writes--and
proceeds to speed through his own yellow light. Self-indulgent
spendthrifts to a man and woman, he says, "the Boomers ran up huge
public and private debts." But soon enough, he's giving himself the
back of his other hand: "Boomers are not primarily responsible for
America's debt crisis. Blame goes mostly to the World War II generation,
which in this regard was not so Great." Hmm. It's just as
well that Kinsley momentarily interrupts the oh-so-easy generalization
about the water-walking achievements of the Boomers' parents. Is Ronald
Reagan, who spent the war making movies, to be honored in the same
breath as his age-mate John F. Kennedy, the commander of PT-109? How
easy it is to congratulate the Greatest Generation while averting one's
eyes from the fact that a good many of them, just a few years earlier,
were isolationists who opposed a foreign policy that might have helped
stop Hitler in the Rhineland, in Austria, or in Spain. Don't get me
wrong: No one dares underplay battlefield sacrifice, not to mention
Rosie's riveting. The elders rose mightily to the occasion--as did the
undrafted women--to help save the world. But their political wisdom came
a bit late, and was largely forced on them.

Yet when Kinsley
addresses the Boomers (an odd "generation" indeed, some of whom were
struggling with the alphabet and others of whom were burning their draft
cards during the Götterdämmerung year of 1968, but never mind), it's as
if they, collectively, have a giant atonement to make. There's "a
vague impression that Boomers as a generation failed some test."

Well, true, they failed to elevate America to city-on-a-hill status,
though of course many of them made this a hell of a lot more decent
country for people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and a lot of
other people of various generations. Of course, when it came (or didn't
come) to the draft, Boomers operated under rules dictated by the
manpower personnel rules established by their seniors, but Kinsley still
wants to hang as much callowness, shallowness, short-sightedness and
greed as possible on them all, the better to play the grand game of
generational preference, which is always a shoddy substitute for an
outright political fight.

Indeed, he goes on, "some of the
poison in American politics over the past generation can be traced back
to the unfairness of the Vietnam-era draft." Somehow I don't see how
hypocritical draft-dodgers George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Rush
Limbaugh deserve the selfsame chastisement as honest Bill Clinton, who
famously wrote that he didn't want to "kill and die" in a dreadful war.
Nor does Kinsley offer the slightest evidence that boomers Newt
Gingrich, Ken Starr, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, or Glenn
Beck are channeling poisons circulated by the Selective Service System
of the '60s. And speaking of Clinton, didn't that tricky boomer leave
the budget in surplus, while tax-slasher Bush, Yale '68, ran two wars
off the books and piled up deficits as if he'd invented the concept?
Boomers all, under the skin, but with rather different politics.

As to the vital dangers of our time, is it really the case that "there
are a dozen ways to look at the national debt and the annual government
deficit, and they all lead to varying degrees of panic"? There's at
least a thirteenth way, that of (among
others) Joseph Stiglitz, three years too old to be a Boomer, who
warns against a "deficit fetish" that gets wheeled out to arrest the
sort of government spending that could help put people back to work and
spare them the muddy slide into poverty. The same position is taken by
Paul Krugman, who sagely observes that the bond market is blithely
unworried about future U. S. solvency and doesn't seem to feel that the
deficit is the monster of all monsters. True, Krugman's a Boomer, and
has less pocket change at his disposal than Peter G. Peterson, whose
eponymous foundation has a billion dollars to spend sounding alarms
about...the deficit. Krugman and Stiglitz: chopped liver?

"The
least we can do" is not smother political disputes with generational
noise.The debate continues here.